Composition

Bring­ing your indi­vidu­al met­al types together

It’s a won­der­ful feel­ing to have a met­al chase in front of you filled with type, know­ing that it’s only held in with the wooden and met­al spa­cing and the expand­ing met­al quoins you’ve used. It’s a dif­fi­cult thing to mas­ter, but prac­tice is your friend.

You need to start by assem­bling the type in a com­pos­ing stick, then trans­fer­ring this to a level sur­face to ‘lock up’. There are some addi­tion­al bits and pieces you’ll need

This is an iter­at­ive pro­cess and you’ll have to go over set­ting type and lock­ing up mul­tiple times before you can be sure it’s safe to attach to the press. The steps are out­lined in this guide to lock­ing up

Where the type meets the impres­sion of the press there’s the tricky busi­ness of makeready: get­ting all of your type, blocks of images and oth­er things to be prin­ted to be per­fectly level so that you can get the right impres­sion on the press. There’s a few point­ers in this tech­nic­al notes on ‘makeready